Competitive Gaming has gained momentum over the past years, making the events bigger and more wide spread. The Evolution Championship Series has been considered to be the biggest of those events by most gaming communities. This major event, also simply shortened to EVO, hosts video game series like Street Fighter, Super Smash Bros and Tekken. All of these games are known as brawlers i.e., games based on fighting in which virtual characters are represented by the respective players. Nonetheless, the mechanics and graphics of the said games are so different that it requires completely different physical requirements for the players to perfect them. That being said, intense training by the so-called pro gamers is a prerequisite. This requirements of specialization couple with perfection also restricts pro players from moving between different games i.e., players become famous in their respective gaming scene. Pro gamers seem to be mostly invested in a game by what is considered to be the main reason for people starting out with video games in the first place: fun. However, prestige and monetary reasons become ever more relevant in this competitive, sport-like, gaming world. In major events like Evo, the prestige is coupled to the prize money to be won. The prize pools have increased significantly over time, as industry partners and sponsors get more and more interested in this growing market segment and its influence. To provide some scale: the biggest tournament for the computer game Dota 2 is called The International and was endowed with a total prize pool of 37,043,366 US$ in 2019 [1]. Furthermore, the same professional gaming community has been challenged by a project program of OpenAI in which they trained a Deep Learning based model to, in an initial phase, play as a single player agent and then eventually in a full five-a-side setup [2]. Google owned AI company Deep Mind pursued a similar effort of developing a machine learning based model to compete with pro players in the computer game StarCraft 2 [3]. These efforts not only indicate the great interest which has developed over the last years, but also show that the goal is to perfect these games as a feat of intelligent systems. The glory of competitive gaming can be attributed to perfection of skill within the respective game framework being a similarity to sports which might also be the reason for these events to be termed e-sports. Reaching a level of perfection within any skill requires an individuals dedication and time. A famous, professional gamer of the Street Fighter gaming series that has shown feats of perfection time and time again is Daigo Umehara. More specifically, the japanese gamer Daigo Umehara, also known as “The Beast”, has been at the epicenter of the historic gaming event known as “Moment 37”. This very special moment often referred to as “Daigo Parry” refers to the final phase of the semi-final match at EVO 2004 in the game Street Fighter III against the professional gamer Justing Wong [4]. Daigo playing the character Ken was “one health bar pixel” away from a loss against Justin’s Chun-Li which could have costed him the tournament, when he was being charged with the opponent’s ultimate move which he ended up parrying fully and countering under frame perfect conditions. Considering the perfect execution of the moves, the comeback from a considerably definitive losing situation and the significance of the match altogether left the crowd hysterically in awe providing cheers and standing ovations. Its documentation paved its way into gaming history. In my personal opinion, a very emotionally intense moment that is being well described by the term “Hype”. Originally, what motivated this article, have been the emotional memory of this moment in addition to providing a more scientific perspective onto this particular event in competitive gaming. Following the definition of a concept from pyschology called “Flow” coined by Prof. Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychological state of being of Daigo Umehara during the execution of the Daigo Parry suits the definition of the former. Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as a pyschological state an individual can experience in which “the optimal state of intrinsic motivation” is achieved, “nothing else matters”, “time flies” and “your whole being is involved”. More specifically, Csikszentmihalyi defines a function of the challenge and skill levels for a given activity, and flow represents the resulting state which is reached when both challenge and skill levels match while being above average [5]. The empirics are based on interviews with various people which use the aforementioned descriptions to describe their personal state while performing i.e., pianists when composing music for instance. Part of the justification comes from the claim that the respective skills which are being performed require so much attention that other aspects of consciousness are being blanked out. That is, the composing musician is so much involved in his activity that his being somewhat “dissolves” from himself i.e., bodily sensations, noise which otherwise can grab attention, etc. all fade away. It is being argued that neurologically the human brain is able to process only a limited number of bits of information per second [6] and that during these “perfect” skill/challenge conditions this threshold of information processing is being matched, thus making it impossible for the individual to basically experience anything else. Figure 1 visualizes this intuition.

fig1
Figure 1: Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Model and Moment 37. On the left, the Flow model is shown. The pyschological state that is being achieved by an individual is portraited as a function of the challenge and skill levels of a given activity. When challenge and skill match while being above average, a state of flow is achieved. On the right, the historic gaming moment is shown that is argued to match the descriptions of the flow state.

My personal claim now conjectures that the professional gamer during Moment 37, Daigo Umehara, found himself in a state of flow as being defined by Csikszentmihalyi. To perform this feat of perfection, Daigo was required to fully involve himself into the activity given that the performance he offered was restricted by frame perfect timing i.e., within six out of 60 frames the right action needs to be active, which translates to an approximate. 100 milliseconds time window, and this has been successfully executed by Daigo for 15 consecutive times [7]. While my claim is supported by both personal experiences in gaming situations that match various aforementioned psychological descriptions and the circumstances of the Daigo Parry, a further claim based on the information processing aspect can be made suggesting that the Daigo Parry would have not been possible if Daigo would have not been in a flow state assuming that to perform such a gaming feat requires the full human information processing bandwidth. This assumption that the feat requires the full human information processing bandwidth is arguably sensible given that, under reaction time considerations, Daigo had to hit a 100 milliseconds window 15 times in a row. The probability of such an event to occur, especially under considerations of the significance of the event and various other factors, seems basically zero - which is then again the reason for it arguably being able to become such a historic and emotional event in the minds of many. Conclusively, Csikszentmihalyi claims that the state of flow and its surrounding states arousal and control are strongly linked to happiness. Personally, I would imagine Daigo to have been dissolved into the moment i.e., him actually becoming that very Moment 37. But immediately after the victory of his, when he regained enough attention span to be scheduled to his own emotional state in his consciousness, that he was being flushed by hormones that push his state of well-being. Whatever is, an incredible moment in gaming history to which arguably many humans can easily relate to and appreciate it.

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